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A collection of poetry by James Harms.

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Reviews / Endorsements



“James Harms’ ingenious new collection, Quarters, collects a sequence of quiet meditations, each of which considers the way those seemingly quotidian events of our lives accrue and resonate with lasting power, often melding both memory and desire. The coin we call a ‘quarter’ becomes for Harms both the common currency (so to speak) of these events and also the triggering device for his poignant reflections. Magically, we see revealed those items exchanged for a quarter: photos from a carnival booth, a beggar’s meager reward, the silvery prize left for a child’s tooth. For Harms, these tokens paid out to our lives and our memories become the small change musically accompanying those acts of real change itself, both large and small, that riddle our experience. James Harms’ poems have always posited the dailiness of any revelation, but in this collection he wants to remind us that many of the grandest things available to us can be had for even the smallest gesture. Likewise, visions of great promise can fade instantly into a series of shattered regrets. After reading James Harms’ powerful new collection, we know all too well which coins to carry on our way to take passage at Charon’s crossing.”—David St. John

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JAMES HARMS is the author of two previous collections of poetry, Modern Ocean (1992) and The Joy Addict (1998), which was awarded the PEN/Revson Fellowship. He lives with his wife, Paige Muendel, and their two children in Morgantown, West Virginia, where he directs the creative writing program at West Virginia University.